Projects and Portfolio

Data Journalism

Anyone entering China by land must know what to expect: The border police raids the smartphone, then an app extracts a lot of private information. We received the code of the surveillance app and analysed the code.

Pirates for boys and fairies for girls? We investigated 50k German language children’s books and identified enduring stereotypes around gender. I was primarily working on a network analysis. Nominated for the Digital Humanities Award 2018.

Writing by numbers: After an election there are two tasks for journalism. First, report the results instantly (which is easy) and second interpret the results (which is not that easy). We wanted to do these two things in an automated way and as fast as possible for all election districts in Bavaria and Hesse. The approach were auto-generated texts and visualisations based on the results of every single district in Bavaria and Hesse: Did a district vote extraordinarily? Similar to the national level? Just slightly different? The method for finding differences was the Jenks algorithm.

Using text mining in political reporting. How does a right-wing, populist party change the atmosphere and the debates in the German parliament? Answers can be found in the official protocols of the Bundestag. The story was awarded with the Nannenpreis 2019.

Show more uncertainty to be more precise. Traditionally, media outlets are reporting about a new poll in the following style:

If an election would be held today, party x would get y percent
of the votes. This is a decline of z percent compared to the previous
week.

Covering polls like this is oversimplifying and even dangerous. Polls
have real impact on decisions of politicians and voters, e.g. due to
feedback loops. Pollsters want to mirror the views of a whole electorate
by asking 1000 to 2000 people. Of course, there is uncertainty. The
approach: Making the visualization more complex, but more precise by showing the uncertainty.

Getting an idea of the blackbox Facebook: Investigating the political sphere on Facebook by crawling the sites of political parties and active users. We evaluated more than one million public Facebook likes from a little less than 5000 politically interested Facebook users.

Software

I published the following open-source software packages:

Generative Art

The R package generativeart let’s you create images based on many thousand points. The position of every single point is calculated by a formula, which has random parameters. Because of the random numbers, every image looks different.

The csv files of Destatis, the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, don’t comply with common standards if a tidy, ready-to-use machine-readable dataset. This tools helps to jump start the data analysis by doing the time-consuming cleaning tasks: